Windows 10/11 it's a shit show. The last good Windows was 8.1. And the last great Windows was 7.

> Windows 10/11 it's a shit show. The last good Windows was 8.1. And the last great Windows was 7.

Yeh I think there's this weird stigma that stuck after Windows 8 was a bit iffy but 8.1 was fine.

I preferred Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 (and MUCH preferred it to 11) because at least it still had all the old core Windows control panel stuff under the hood. Windows 10 feels like a way more awkward mismash of things because they seem to have simply just taken a bunch of stuff away.

The zillions of different UI paradigms smooshed together started in Win8 but Win10 is where they really seemed to pile it on.

Anyway, I'm not a Mac user. But I absolutely see why they want to keep touch interface separate from keyboard & mouse. It's hard.

No; the last great Windows was XP.

7 started the regression in earnest, especially in the GUI.

The GUI in 7 was so much better than anything before or since.

Mmm, pretty sure 7 was when they introduced stupid junk like "transparency." A quick search pulls up this gem: https://www.rossul.com/2009/blog/vista-and-windows-7-gui-mys...

They also started obscuring the color-scheme editor, the eventual removal of which was a major blunder. By the time people finally realized that inverse color schemes are dumb, the color-scheme editor was gone and they had to wait for Microsoft and everyone else to implement hard-coded "dark mode" all over the place.

From Windows 3.1 through XP, I had simply created a "dark mode" color scheme at the system level; all properly-written applications inherited the system color scheme in Windows. Such an obvious, useful mechanism that Microsoft "forgot" and Apple to this day has never learned.

Even '90s Unix GUIs let you set up a color scheme, if I remember correctly.

XP was just an ugly skin on top of the magnificent Windows 2000.

Oh right; I always forget that XP shipped with the insulting and horrible Fischer-Price motif enabled by default. The first thing I did was switch it to "classic" mode, which was the last revision of MS's GOOD windows GUI.

Oh, totally. Windows 10 and 11 suck for a great many reason.

But how they handle touch input is not one of them.

> still doesn't offer touch on any of their notebooks

Is that a feature people actually use? My last laptop had it, but I eventually disabled it in the BIOS because I never really used it, except by accident. I didn't find it comfortable holding my arm out at that angle, and I didn't like having all the fingerprints on my screen.